Total Recall - C. Gordon Bell [78]
I believe in taking video “cliplets”—little clips of five seconds or less. Five seconds is often all it takes to capture the ambience of a moment. No photo, no matter how good, can convey the movement like the five seconds of hula dancers I shot in Hawaii. A quick shot of my grandson saying hello is priceless. And sometimes I like to swing the camera around in a panorama in an attempt to capture the feel of a place I’m in. My camera and cell phone are fine for video cliplets, so I don’t bother with a video camera much. With longer videos, I have to be concerned about space on my PC. So most long videos remain in DVD form, but all my video cliplets get added to my e-memory.
Remember when people put pins in a map to show where they had traveled? You can do it digitally by collecting global positioning system (GPS) tracks. I’ve made trip records of walks, car rides, train rides, and airplane rides. The GPS comes with me into the wilderness and into the skies thirty thousand feet above the Pacific Ocean. You either need a cell phone with GPS records that you can export from it, or a stand-alone GPS unit that you can carry in your pocket.
If batteries are a hassle, and you use your car a lot, it may suffice to have a car charger and just leave the GPS in your car. This at least gives an approximation of where you are, based on where you drove to.
In addition to creating a record of your travels, a GPS is used to add location information to photos. As I’ll discuss later, manual labeling of photos can be a lot of work, so having time and location correct on every photo is critical. If you don’t have a GPS camera, then you need to ensure that the date and time on your camera are set correctly (actually, you should be sure of that anyhow—you will be really glad to have the right time on all your photos). Now, if you know from the GPS where you were at a certain time, and you know when a picture was taken, you can infer where the picture was taken. The location information can then be inserted into the picture file alongside the date and time. This is called geotagging or geolocating your photos. You can do this with Microsoft Pro Photo Tools, HoudahGeo, or many other programs available on the Web (your GPS device may come with such software).
An alternative to GPS is a memory card with built-in Wi-Fi networking for your camera. This allows you to wirelessly transmit your photos back to your computer or an online photo-sharing site. More important, the card can geolocate every photo—so long as there are Wi-Fi signals at your location.
For audio recording, I carry an Olympus WS-320 audio recorder (though changing batteries is a pain). In a pinch, I also record using the audio recording function in my cell phone. For recording meetings, I like to use OneNote and record directly into my PC. To save telephone conversations, Skype calls can be saved automatically. Recording from a cell phone or home phone is presently more complicated, and there are legal issues; I’d wait for that space to evolve a little more before you jump in.
HEALTH DATA
Health logging is going to rapidly improve in quality convenience in the next few years. Do everything you can to get involved in this potentially life-changing and life-saving trend. You are the only one with access to all of your health data, so take ownership of it and collect all that you can. Take advantage of new technology that helps you achieve quantitative health.
Start out by creating a simple document for medical information about you and any family members you want to keep track of. List all the immunizations, allergies, medications, and any important events, for example, when a surgery was performed. Whenever you get a simple test result—say, a blood pressure value—add it to the document. Aim to have all the key statistics about your